What is happening to the IPCC?

For the first time, it’s being left out of the loop

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will not be attending the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP18/CMP8) in Doha, chairman Dr Rajendra K Pachauri has said.

“For the first time in the 18 years of COP, the IPCC will not be attending, because we have not been invited,” he told Gulf Times in Doha.

COP18 is to be held from November 26 to December 7.

The IPCC, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, former vice president of the US and environmental activist, is the leading international body for the assessment of climate change. Currently 195 countries are members.

Dr Pachauri first hinted about his ‘anticipated absence’ at COP18, while speaking at the opening session of the International Conference on Food Security in Dry Lands (FSDL) on Wednesday at Qatar University.

Later, he told Gulf Times he did not know why the IPCC has not been invited to COP18, something that has never happened before.

“I don’t know what it is. The executive secretary of the climate change secretariat has to decide. I have attended every COP and the chairman of the IPCC addresses the COP in the opening session,” he explained.

What I find most unusual is that Pachy spoke about it, saying he didn’t know the reason. He is unable to pick up the phone and ask, or get someone else to do so?

His comment is either disingenuous or indicative of an isolated megalomaniac being brought up suddenly to the reality of what others think. Recall Conrad Black saying he wished to smash the face of the Brit journalist who insisted Black, having been convicted of a crime and gone to jail, was a criminal? An inability to recognize anything outside of his own worldview.

I first thought this non-invitation was a hoax or a joke by Pachy. I’m still trying to figure out what it means. The IPCC, if toned down, could be of financial benefit to the oil producers, as it encourages higher prices. Oil producers could themselves tag on a “climate control cost” as autoshops tag on an “environmental” cost to disposing of the old oil they get from your car (and sell to oil recyclers, who sell it back to you!). Spin is how you take the bad and make it look good.

If the “world” is at risk, we don’t need carbon taxes to reduce oil and gas use. All we need is all the oil producers, of which there aren’t many, to “voluntarily” add $20/bbl to their products to, in theory, go into CO2 injection schemes they are funding themselves.

Is it possible even the UN is embarrassed by their Delinquent offspring? When bringing your own in house expert to the meeting makes you even less credible, its smart to leave them at home.
Does anyone know which governments were asking for investigation of the IPCC?

AR5 is due out next year, will “scare the pants off” us according to Yvo de Boer but has no COP18 impact. I think we can be sure the UNFCCC has a media blitz strategy to keep the IPCC and AR5 in reserve for some really really scary stuff next year.

every institution, political or scientific, is doubling down on the global warming hoax now.

Gosh, Harry, might it just be that they know rather more than you do?

A new report issued by the World Bank warned that, based on current climate models, the world can expect extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.

The report says today’s climate could “warm from the current global mean temperature of 0.8°C above pre-industrial levels, to as high as 4°C by 2100, even if countries fulfill current emissions-reduction pledges.”

Not according to the Articles of Agreement. The World Bank (not a real bank) is merely a group of lender agencies answerable to member countries that contribute the funds that are lent. The purposes of the Bank are (from Articles of Agreement):

(i) To assist in the reconstruction and development of territories of members by facilitating the investment of capital for productive purposes, including the restoration of economies destroyed or disrupted by war, the reconversion of productive facilities to peacetime needs and the encouragement of the development of productive facilities and resources in less developed countries.

(ii) To promote private foreign investment by means of guarantees or participations in loans and other investments made by private investors; and when private capital is not available on reasonable terms, to supplement private investment by providing, on suitable conditions, finance for productive purposes out of its own capital, funds raised by it and its other resources.

(iii) To promote the long-range balanced growth of international trade and the maintenance of equilibrium in balances of payments by encouraging international investment for the development of the productive resources of members, thereby assisting in raising productivity, the standard of living and conditions of labor in their territories.

(iv) To arrange the loans made or guaranteed by it in relation to international loans through other channels so that the more useful and urgent projects, large and small alike, will be dealt with first.

(v) To conduct its operations with due regard to the effect of international investment on business conditions in the territories of members and, in the immediate postwar years, to assist in bringing about a smooth transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy.

Why “the Arab world” is singled out I’m not sure, several are oil producers

>”Might not climate change impact some or all of that…..?”

Not much. Their internal “help reduce poverty” mission and MDGs adoption is subject to the above external agreement. What they are after is climate money that can be extracted from any source that the bank hopes to be trustee for Brando. Billions (they hope) in addition to bank capital for which the World Bank acts as trustee (i.e. clip the ticket) if they can get hold of it (e.g. GCF for which it is interim trustee).

For which they need sources of funding. If the climate scare goes away so does that funding, mostly from govt taxes by countries that are already funding the bank as shareholders and WB involvement evaporates. Needless to say, developed countries pay the lions share.

Climate funds (e.g. GCF) are in addition to authorized WB capital (US$10bn) of which 20% is paid up (US$2bn), any more is a call or an increase in capital stock so any extra funds that the World Bank can add to business (e.g. as trustee) that can be siphoned off on the pretext of a doomed planet is a bank bonus.

Hence the report “Turn Down the Heat” as part of their Climate Change operation (quoting blurb “The report warns that the world will heat up by 4 degrees at the end of the century if the global community fails to act on climate change.”). That scare campaign (read – spin it to the moon) is a necessary strategy to keep govt funding spigots open especially those of the five largest shareholders, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States (those with spare funds that is – I note Greece is not a member). Those five countries may be largest shareholders but a look at their debt-to-GDP tells another story (notably Japan, and the US is preoccupied with its fiscal cliff):-

So it’s all about the money Brando and WB funding sources are threatened. “4 degrees at the end of the century” is merely spin for maximum scare and wild conjecture to drum up business from disinterested govts in an ailing sector of WB operation (and it held so much promise too).

You are right on one thing though. I have zero respect for these “scientists” with their blatant activism, for the media, the BBC especially, and any of the other parasites that are on the AGW and renewable energy gravy train

Kudos to Richard C for taking on Ken, who seems to feel free to make completely unsupported claims against me.

He seems upset that I refer to “liberal slime” yet all he can do is slime me and not actually address any of the issues.

I guess I am slightly coloured by having watched, in the UK, the BBC bias in full swing. From covering up the Saville affair, the fake accusations of Lord McAlpine paedophile stuff, and then the whole 28gate/Newbury affair that had no mention in the MSM whatsoever.

Forgive me if I am a little cynical about the state of the world right now

Fact is, the poor — those the World Bank says it’s in the business to help — are hurt more by carbon taxes than the middle class and rich because they spend a higher portion of their income on energy. They’re also harmed more than the middle and upper classes for the same reason when carbon-trading schemes are implemented.

But the World Bank is a political organization and its decisions are based on the political fashions of the day, not rational analysis. And today’s popular politics demand a religious belief in the speculation that man’s greenhouse-gas emissions are heating the planet to intolerable levels.

A quarter of a century ago, James Bovard of the Cato Institute wrote that “although the bank started with the highest ideals,” it had by the late 1980s devolved into an organization that helps “Third World governments cripple their economies, maul their environments and oppress their people.

“It now consistently does more harm than good for the world’s poorest.”

Things haven’t changed much for the World Bank since 1987. It’s still breaking whatever it puts its hands on. The biggest difference is that 25 years ago, it couldn’t use the global warming nonsense as a wrecking ball.

Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) is an IPCC lead author, advisor on Hans Schellnhuber’s WBGU, and one of Germany’s most influential climate scientists. Today it is widely known that journalists and scientists who express doubt over man-made climate change or criticism over the science and the IPCC often find themselves attacked by the Potsdam professor via the press or his Internet blog.

For German science journalist Irene Meichsner, it was in the wake of Climategate when she penned an unflattering piece about the IPCC and the slew of errors and false assumptions in its Fourt Assessment Report. Her story was published on February 8, 2010, in two German dailies: the Kölner Stadtsanzeiger (KStA) and the Frankfurter Rundschau (FR). Sticking to the facts, Meichsner’s damning piece cast the IPCC’s credibility into serious doubt.

In conclusion

Indeed it’s not a topic for those with thin skin and people who can’t afford to put their careers on the line. Expressing skepticism over a politically correct issue in Germany indeed leads to malicious nattacks. Like the old saying goes: Sometimes it’s much more dangerous to speak up against wrongdoing than it is to commit it.

It is quite remarkable what a load of self-indulgent pseudo-intellectual drivel gets spouted at NZ’s “Science” blogs.

Take this comment on Ken’s syndicated post of the above:

Stuart Mathieson 3 days ago

I think the capacity to trust is an important ingredient here. As Bruce Schneier says, trust is infra-digital. A child frequently betrayed will develop a fortress mentality. All of the psychologists agree I think that the development of the Ego and who gets included in its moral universe works this way. Freud, Piaget, Kohlberg, Blasi. Rather than revise your core beliefs and the associated cognitive dissonance the most preposterous conspiracy theories will be entertained. Prof. Charles Higham the archeologist at Otago calls them “pyramidamaniacs”. Nutters who rearrange the evidence with dynamite to save the theory.

Well, possibly, and since we are in a good-willed mood of politeness I should retract, so fair enough.

However, I find these pseudo-intellectual and sanctimonious scribblings irritating in the least.

Of the so-called “experts” in the list cited by Ken, I have experience that matches at least one. My work life is one of constant tyre-kicking and criticism of my work. I am under a semi-permanent, daily, performance review. It keeps me on my toes and my work of good quality

My limited experience of academia is that no one checks your work. You can get away with blue murder, and as long at it is “on message” everyone gives you a pat on the back.

You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist of someone “of extreme conservative views”, as Ken describes me, to appreciate this.

Incidentally, I wonder what a person of “of extreme conservative views” looks like? Someone who bakes lots of cupcakes, or attends school parent-teacher interviews perhaps?

Schellnhuber is a leading member of the Potsdam institute, one of the temples of the warmist religion and he expressed his views to “more than 100 scientists” who are meeting at Oxford University “to discuss the dangers of climate change causing droughts, floods and mass extinctions around the world.”

His little conference is but one part of the hype as the warmists desperately try to fan the flames of public concern as a prelude to the Copenhagen conference at the end of the year.

But if Schellnhuber was at all honest – and tell me one warmist that is – he would also have to admit that there were some Americans who were very “climate literate”, and had just shot his fox, totally destroying the iconic “hockey stick”.

The trouble is that not only are the warmists fundamentally dishonest, so are the media. We are looking here at what I would have no difficulty in describing as scientific fraud on an industrial scale – striking at the very heart of the claims on global warming. Yet, apart from Booker, you will struggle to find any criticism of this fraud in the MSM – and nothing at all about the latest developments.

So my question for Ken and the fans of this report is, why did they chose a serial alarmist to produce the report and not the more measured tones of the IPCC?

There is political spin being pushed around the IPCC at the moment. There seems to be an initiative to reposition the IPCC as “the voice of reason” Hence some alarmist/warmist individuals are starting to claim the IPCC have underestimated the effects of AGW, & generally criticizing the IPCC as being too soft. This is the narrative we will be hearing over the next few months. It’s to try to influence the public opinion that the IPCC is a more conservative body than it actually is. All politics. Certainly does not mean the IPCC has changed in the slightest.

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Hot spot doesn’t exist

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GHG fingerprint missing

About 2000, climate scientists predicted and the IPCC agreed that, if the global temperature was strongly influenced by carbon dioxide (or GHG generally), there would be a unique "fingerprint" of that influence high over the tropics — a tropospheric "hot spot". So they started looking for it. Pretty soon after that, some of them made up wild claims that they'd found it, but at the same time others were inventing fanciful reasons for why it wasn't there. It's still missing.